Music, Nature, Research

What music do birds like? Find out with a Raspberry Pi, a camera, and loads of tunes!

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PandoraBird

Elizabeth Demaray, in collaboration with computer scientist Ahmed Elgammal and Rutgers University’s Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has developed a way to determine if music affects the moods and habits of birds. Masquerading as a bird table, PandoraBird plays music in the background while birds eat from the table. A Raspberry Pi plays the music and has a camera for monitoring how long the birds stay on the table. If the bird is still there when the music ends, the Pi queues up another from the same genre to see if the bird will stay to listen. Read more over at Elizabeth’s site. Thanks to Adafruit for noticing this one.

Operating systems, Video

Loop video files the easy way with a Raspberry Pi and MP4Museum

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Sometimes, you just want to be able to loop some videos with no muss and no fuss. Enter German artist Julius Schmiedel who has developed a downloadable OS image, called MP4Museum, based on Raspbian Lite and OMXPlayer which reads MP4 files from a USB drive and just plays them alphabetically, on a loop. And, oh yes, it’s read-only which means you can just yank the power from it without causing OS corruption! Get the OS here. Thanks to Adafruit for spotting this one!

Competitions

Christmas 2016 Raspberry Pi Giveaway – fill in a form, win prizes!

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Christmas 2016 giveaway

Last year, I ran a Raspberry Pi giveaway which was wildly successful – I had 400 entries. So, this year, I’m hoping to beat that!

There’s a simple form to fill in and you’ll be in with a chance of winning what I think are great prizes for the Pi enthusiast! There’s no catch – this is just something nice I like to do at Christmas time to spread some festive cheer 🙂

Go to the giveaway page.

Geeky Techiness, GPIO boards, Great Sites

Drawing your attention to a ridiculously useful Raspberry Pi site: pinout.xyz

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lots-of-boards

Phil Howard, who works for awesome maker firm Pimoroni, has a pet project he and others (including @RogueHal13) have been working on for a couple of years now: pinout.xyz. It is a fantastic database of add-on boards for the Raspberry Pi that shows you what GPIO pins are being used, what for, and which ones are, therefore, free. So, for instance, this is the link to the SenseHAT page which shows you that the only pins used are the I2C  pins. Here’s a picture of the interface, which you can see is really well done.

pinout.xyz

It really is an excellent site. Phil even accepts GitHub submissions to the site to keep it up-to-date with new boards as they are released. So, if you’re ever in need of finding out that vital piece of information about an add-on board, head over to pinout.xyz.

Programming, Retro, Software

Slack client for the Commodore 64 uses Raspberry Pi to connect to the outside world

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slack

Jeff Harris recently identified a severe problem with Slack: there isn’t a client for the Commodore 64. I know, crazy, huh? So, he decided to write one in 6502 assembly. Using a C64 Userport device, he’s connected the Commodore to a Raspberry Pi which is, in turn, connected to the Internet and the Slack API via NodeJS. You can read how he did it and get hold of the software here. A demo is below:

Blinkies, Internet of things, Tutorials

The Internet of Things just got stranger with this Raspberry Pi alphabet lighting system

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lightsonthewall

Seb Lee-Delisle is a digital artist who decided to bring some Internet of Things magic to his Christmas decorations. He’s taken a Raspberry Pi and some addressable fairy lights and rigged up an alphabet display on his wall (see below for a demo).


You login to the web interface (see the top of this blog post) and then click on the letters shown to activate the real-life lights in his home. It’s very neat and he’s written the whole thing up as a tutorial so if you want to have your own wall of letter lights, you can! Go here to read the tutorial.